Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 12:41:50 -0800 (PST) From: david.myers@Corp.Sun.COM To: freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Subject: A pointed question: SMP directions... Message-ID: <199712052041.MAA21802@concord.Corp.Sun.COM>
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Folks: Let me ask a pointed question as... delicately... as I can. I've been using FreeBSD on my home machine for close to two years. Like it a lot. Gotten very comfortable with it. Particularly like the ports collection and the ease of bringing software up on it. But I've got this nifty dual Pentium Pro box. As it happens, I also work for Sun, doing mostly Java work. So Solaris 2.6 looms large. The pointed question to this list: rate yourself, guys. Rate your progress in getting multiprocessor/multithreading BSD up and running. How close are you to matching the SMP features of the Solaris kernel? (And I think back to the couple of bad years we had when our kernel was having growing pains...) Now, add to that the difficulties in getting Java up and running under FreeBSD -- Kaffe will be very nice *someday* -- and what can I say? I'm leaning towards Solaris. Note that I'm not a kernel hacker, and 90% solutions are probably fine. I'm looking for that warm, fuzzy feeling that SMP FreeBSD will be "rock solid", as the CD packaging says. I'm just thinking, we've got some awfully smart people here at Sun, and it sure took them a long time to get SMP right. Now, of course, Solaris is a little more piggish than BSD -- "meant for mission-critical applications" as we would say around the office. I've never liked SysV from a user and administrator point of view, but I've learned to cope, what with a Sparc box sitting on my desk. And attempting to master Solaris' bizarre PPP implementation is always a joy -- a real problem for a home/hacker machine. But that out-of-the-box multi-CPU support and the kernel Java support look nice... So I'd love to hear what the roadmap looks like; what the projected feature set of SMP FreeBSD will look like. And timelines. How far do you think you'll get by the time 3.0-RELEASE comes out? Comments from users making/contemplating similar moves will also be appreciated. -David.
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